Mail-Enable Multiple Existing Contacts

Applies to: Exchange Server 2010

You can mail-enable existing contact objects in Active Directory by populating their Exchange attributes (such as the contact's alias and external e-mail address).

To mail-enable existing contacts, at a minimum you must provide external e-mail addresses. When mail-enabling several contacts in bulk, it's easier to first export the list of contacts to a .csv file, and then add the external e-mail addresses to the .csv file by using a text editor such as Notepad, or a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Office Excel. You can then use the updated .csv file in your bulk mail-enabling operation.

Looking for other management tasks related to managing mail contacts and mail users? Check out Managing Mail Contacts and Mail Users.

Use the Shell to mail-enable multiple existing contacts

You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure. To see what permissions you need, see the "Mail contacts" entry in the Mailbox Permissions topic.

1. This example exports the list of existing contacts in your organization that aren't mail-enabled to the .csv file ContactsList.

   Get-Contact | Out-File "C:\ContactsList.CSV"
   

   The resulting .csv file will be similar to the following:

   #TYPE System.Management.Automation.PSCustomObject,
   Name
   Kim Abercrombie
   Don Funk
   Sanjay Patel
   Amy Strande
   ...
   

2. For each contact, add a column heading and the external e-mail addresses to the .csv file. The updated .csv file should look similar to the following:

   #TYPE System.Management.Automation.PSCustomObject,
   Name,ExternalAddress
   Kim Abercrombie,Kim@contoso.com
   Don Funk,Don@fabrikam.com
   Sanjay Patel,Sanjay@fabrikam.com
   Amy Strande,Amy@contoso.com
   ...
   

3. This example imports and uses the data in the .csv file so you can mail-enable the contacts in bulk.

   Import-CSV "C:\ContactsList.CSV" | ForEach-Object {Enable-MailContact -Identity $_.Name -ExternalEmailAddress $_.ExternalAddress}
   

For detailed syntax and parameter information, see Get-Contact or Enable-MailContact.